Hundred Dollar Holiday: A Wabi-Sabi Solution

“It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!” — How the Grinch Stole Christmas

It’s that time of year. I feel the madness building.

Christmas is coming, and I don’t want to.

I was once the Christmas Queen, so eager to pull out the bins full of decorations and ornaments as soon as the last Thanksgiving dish was wiped clean. I decorated every room, baked several kinds of cookies and other goodies, and presided over a Christmas Eve extravaganza that took weeks to produce.

I tried to explain this to my kids, who are teenagers now and don’t believe in Santa or anything. They don’t understand.

“What happened to you?” my daughter said when I told her my plan to skip Christmas and all its stress this year.

It’s a good question.

Maybe I’m avoiding Christmas because I don’t have money to throw at it this year. As wabi-sabi as I want to be, I’ve spent a small fortune making Christmas and Solstice magical (fresh goose, mistletoe wreaths and all my other Martha-wannabe ideas were never cheap). This year, which doesn’t include a regular paycheck, that’s not an option.

I’ve written in the past about Bill McKibben’s Hundred Dollar Holiday, and I’ve always wanted to give it a try but have never had the fortitude. Whatever misgivings I had about Christmas commercialism weren’t big enough to override the ease of throwing cash at the thing. (Overnight shipping is a blessing at any cost when you’ve forgotten to send your mother a present in all the holiday madness.)

McKibben writes that “Christmas is too wonderful a celebration to give up on, too precious a time simply to repeat the same empty gestures from year to year.”

He says the $100 number is just a number and that the point is to replace materialistic ways of celebrating with non-materialistic ones.

That’s not a new idea, yet it looms as an intimidating challenge. I’m just beginning to see it as a fun and amusing one as well. Wish me luck.